• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.1-27
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• 2017

My aim in this paper is to provide a clear view of Victorian gender ideology and highlight the role played by Browning's dramatic monologues in the challenge against the strict patriarchal codes of the era. Laura Mulvey's Male Gaze theory in cinema is especially useful for understanding Browning's most well-known dramatic monologues, "Porphyria's Lover," and "My Last Duchess," because these poems are structured by polarities of looking and being looked at, the active and the passive. In her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Mulvey introduced the second-wave feminist concept of "male gaze" as a feature of gender power asymmetry in film. To gaze implies more than to look at – it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze. She declares that in patriarchal society pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. Browning's women are subject to the male gaze, but they refuse to become the objects of a scopophilic pleasure-in-looking. Porphyria and the Duchess don't exist in order to satisfy the desires and pleasures of men. They reveal themselves as an autonomous being - reserved in Victorian gender dynamics for men. Mulvey advocates 'an alternative cinema' which can challenges the male-dominated Hollywood ideology. It is possible to say that Browning's dramatic monologues correspond to Mulvey's 'alternative cinema' because they show a counterview in terms of the representation of woman against the Victorian patriarchal ideology.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.565-588
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• 2012

This paper aims at reconsidering 'suture,' a key concept in early Lacanian film criticism, with a view to narrowing a supposed gap between early Lacanian and later Lacanian film criticism. Early Lacanian film theorists, among whom Jean-Pierre Oudart, Jean-Louis Baudry, Laura Mulvey and Daniel Dayan, to name a few, are prominent, focus on cinematic signifying system as well as its ideological effects on shaping subjectivity of the audience. Initiated by Jacques-Alain Miller's article on suture as the logic of signifier and grafted into film as the logic of the cinematic by Oudart's writing, the concept of suture was established as a key word in early Lacanian film criticism. In their taxonomy, suture refers to the processes by which the audience are stitched into the story-world of a film. The audience are drawn into the film and take up positions as subjects-within-the-film such that they make sense of and respond to what the film represents as they are encouraged to do so by the film itself. On the other hand, later Lacanian film critics, who are much influenced by Lacan's later emphasis on the Real, focus on concepts such as gaze, petit objet a, fantasy, rather than suture. They are more concerned with the failure of suture and the disruption of the Symbolic than the ideological effects of suture and the consolidation of the Symbolic. They require a break from the previous approach of Lacanian film theory which centers around the Imaginary and the Symbolic. However, early Lacanian and later Lacanian film theory do not manifest as much disparity as they are supposed to do, for both are against the ideological manipulation of suture. Slavoj Žižek, a leading scholar of later Lacanian psychoanalysis, revives the concept of suture as a patch of the Symbolic which covers the gap, if not always successful.